William Carlos Williams Quotes

Marriage

So different, this man
And this woman:
A stream flowing
In a field.

In description words adhere to certain objects, and have the effect on the sense of oysters, or barnacles.

The pure products of America
go crazy...

...[] No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches-

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind-

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined-
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance-Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless. — through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.

If you can bring nothing to this place
but your carcass, keep out.
(Dedication for a Plot of Ground)

We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.

I prefer not to starve, to live by the practice of medicine, which combines the best features of both science and philosophy with that imponderable and enlightening element, disease, unknown in its normality to either. But, like Pasteur, when he was young, or anyone else who has something to do, I wish I had more money for my literary experiments.”

William Carlos Williams, c. 1931

Beautiful thing, my dove, unable and all who are windblown, touched by the fire and unable, a roar that (soundless) drowns the sense with its reiteration unwilling to lie in its bed and sleep and sleep, sleep in its dark bed. Summer! it is summer . — and still the roar in his mind is unabated

No defeat is made up entirely of defeat — since the world it opens is always a place formerly unsuspected. A world lost, a world unsuspected beckons to new places and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory of whiteness .

After some years of varied experience with the bodies of the rich and the poor a man finds little to distinguish between them, bulks them as one and bases his working judgements on other matters.

I had sent [the magazine] a batch of poems which they turned down flat. I was furious. Floss [my wife] said, 'If I were the editor of that magazine *I* would turn down what *you* sent.' So *she* picked a batch and they accepted them *all*.

The poet thinks with his poem...